Not like other people, not every week,
Not all the time, in a century but twice,
I prayed to you: please intelligibly
Reiterate the words of creation.

Unbearable to you are the admixtures
Of intimacies and people's slavishness.
How could you possibly make me happy?
With what would you consume the earth's salt?

1915

Spring

Spring, coming in from street, where poplars
stand amazed, the distance is scared, the houses
afraid to fall down, the air blue, like a sack
of clothes carried by a patient leaving a hospital.

Where the evening is empty, an interrupted tale,
left abandoned by a star without continuation
to the incomprehension of a thousand noisy eyes
of the homeless and those bereft of expression.

1918

Gentleness

With blinding brilliance
The evening dawns at seven.
From streets toward awnings
Darkness marches apace.
People – they are manikins;
Only lust and sadness lead
Them across the universe
Feeling their way by touch.
The heart under the palm
Betrays with its shuddering
Tension of chase and escape,
Glimmers of fright and flight.
Feelings take to liberty
And freedom with ill-ease,
Tearing just like a horse
At the bit of its mouthpiece.

All that is past appears to us a dream,
All future – a distant wish unfulfilled,
In the present moment only do we live
An immediate life that is fully real.

The uninterrupted moment's lightning flash
into the here and now is what makes us as
indestructible as melded metal seams –
of our wished-for futures, our past dreams.

20 December 1940

How many years now I've silently desired
to trade in my bookcase for a simple shelf
and rebind my poetry books in new covers.
Oh, Muse, forgive a poet's selfish dreams.
Money pans, flashes, and is gone in a blink.
A poet's dreams may never be fulfilled.

10 January 1941

Poet, why do you swill stale wine,
then pour the dregs in new bottles?
All of it was said before, of old,
and rhyme will not refresh a line.

What you pour forth is an old game,
plagiary will not spread your name:
“The Song of Songs” said all of love
and the Ecclesiast had death foretold.

27 January 1941

The poet, poor wretch, puts on airs,
but nothing comes out on paper.
Let him bluster and flaunt some more –
perhaps the poem will write itself.

January 1941

With all the reports from the front I had read,
I woke at night drenched in sweat and in dread:
I dreamt I had lost my ration card for bread.

To write from nature
is lovely and refreshing.
The chickens stroll –
and all is swell.

The bushes as well,
for them I'm grateful.
Everything for the poet,
and with the poet, a fête.

1939

December's here but there's no snow
And mud and dirt go on and on
And everybody's feet slide apart.
December's come, the snow has not.
And everyone gets irritated
And curses that there is no snow
And snow awaits and waits and waits.
When will it snow? But there is none.
The mud and dirt go on and on.

1939

I like it very much when
the weather is wet and warm,
that rotten leaf smell. When
the distance is lit up by a haze
so sorrowful and silent. When
everything moves slowly. And when
the fog is everywhere and water also.

1940

I walk this world's hurly-burly
Toward some mysterious end
Above me the purple-clad stars
Strewn, spun by someone overhead.

Earthly comfort, dull and unpleasant.
Under my window the howls of dogs.
How could I possibly be connected
To this world's great mystery?